


Rituality

by prismica



Category: Noblesse (Manhwa)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, And Takeo is very fond of them both in his own tired way, M/M, Tao is a very gay university kid, Teira is a social and cute little kid with no chill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 07:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8093206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prismica/pseuds/prismica
Summary: In which Takeo raises his little sister, and Tao wedges himself into their close-knit life far more easily than he should. A normal, modern remix.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Takeo is too sweet and protective to not have a cute little sibling to nag on, so here’s a happy modern AU where he actually has one. Did I mention she's not an sadistic mastermind?
> 
> 1) I used Teira’s name, but bear in mind she’s a TOTALLY different entity than Dr. Aris. 2) The age gap between Takeo and his sister is much bigger in this than it was shown to be in canon, and ages are shuffled around a bit.

When Tao finally felt a pair of eyes burning holes into him, he had to wonder how long they’d been staring in the first place. The outside world had a tendency to become an atmosphere of blurred-out white noise when he programmed, and this project in particular seemed to really leech every bit of attention and energy he had in him.

“Whatcha doin’ mister?”

He took out his earbuds and looked down to face his visitor: a little girl just tall enough to rest her chin on top of the edge of the table (‘ _five, maybe?_ ’) with a messy bun of brown hair adding a few false inches to her height. She seemed awfully interested in what he was doing, and the programmer couldn’t help but find it a little endearing.

“I’m programming.” He saved his code as he answered, getting the feeling that might be preoccupied with her for a while.

“What’s that?”

“It's… like writing a to-do list for my computer.” It wasn’t an accurate description, exactly, but describing the semantics of programming to a five-year-old seemed like a _very_ bad plan.

Curious, she edged herself closer towards Tao’s side of the table, leaning up on her tip-toes to try and see the screen. She didn’t seem very amused, mouth pursed in a confused expression as she stared at the lines of green and purple text that didn’t seem to be doing anything other than just being a bunch of garble on a screen.

“Yeah I know, it’s not cool—not yet, anyway,” Tao rubbed the back of his neck with a laugh, unsure of how to placate the kid lurking around his table. This was his work laptop. He didn’t exactly have any fun games on i—wait. He did have _that_ , though.

“But hey, do you wanna see something cute?” The girl instantly perked up then, nodding and leaning in closer as he pulled the laptop closer towards the table’s edge. With a few taps of his keyboard, everything he had opened minimized, revealing a desktop with a handful of little cat mascots crawling around on a plain black background.

“There’s so many kitties—!“ Then, a gasp. “Look! There’s one on the top, too! What’s it doin' up there?” Suddenly she was pointing at everything she could, cooing at the calico crawling up the side and aww’ing at the fluffy white cat snoozing on his taskbar.

 _That_ seemed to amuse her.

“Ooh, the one at the top? He’s my favorite. Oh! You can drag them around too. Here, touch the screen.” She did as he suggested and giggled as the cats wiggled around at her fingertips. Tao didn’t seem to mind the smudge marks beginning to smear his laptop screen as much as he usually did. It was just the sacrifice he had to make for entertaining a cute kid. Now, about this kid’s guardian…

“Teira!” A sudden cry broke the two from their fun, and Tao whipped his head around to face an oncoming and very exasperated-looking man in a ponytail. ‘ _Ahh_ , _he must be the dad…_ ’ Tao thought. ‘ _A very attractive one, though,_ ’ he had to add. ‘ _And all that purple **hair**_.’

No, no, no. He wasn’t starting this, not with a man with a kid _._ He was probably _married_.

“I told you not to run off,” The stranger scolded, balancing two coffee cups in his hand as ruffled her head with the other. It wasn’t well-received. She groaned and thwacked at the hand ruffling her bun until it stopped ruining her hair.  “And I told you not to bother strangers, didn’t I?”

“But… but he has _cats_.” The man fondly snorted at that, shuffling the smaller of the two cups into his free hand and handing it to her.

“Take your hot cocoa, kiddo.”

For a moment, Tao simply didn’t exist and he was glad for it. The exchange between the man and child was too precious, and it wasn’t every day that he got to see someone quite so handsome bond with a child like this. (He found himself a bit envious, really.)

“I’m very sorry about that…” Tao’s head perked up from his palm when the stranger addressed him, feeling nothing but pure abashment coming from the stranger’s expression. “She’s pretty social and well, she doesn’t listen to me all that much, either.”

“Aw, don’t apologize. She’s a fun little lady. Her company didn’t bother me any.” The father (?) smiled at that, but the abashed look still hadn’t left his face.

“Can I buy you another coffee at least? For your time, I mean.” He asked, gesturing at the almost empty coffee on the table. It had long gone cold by now, ignored for well over an hour as he worked on his code and played with the kid.

“Heh, nah, I’ve had one too many. Thanks, though.” The man just nodded with a quiet ‘if you insist’, reaching for the girl’s hand and telling her to say her good-byes.

“Buh-bye cat-man!”

Tao laughed and donned his most posh accent, bowing slightly in her direction.

“Farewell, your kitty majesty!”

He could hear her laughing at his farewell as she walked out the café's front door.

Now, about compiling all that code… 

* * *

Another week, another project. This time it was a joint affair, and the pressure to complete it ahead of time instead of waiting ‘til the last minute was weighing down on his shoulders. No distractions. Just him, his laptop, his music, and his recently-claimed corner at the local café.

(Oh, sure, there was the café on campus, but everyone there was a distraction—‘ _can you help me test this?_ ’, ‘ _what’s with this syntax error?_ ’, ‘ _why is my code not compiling?_ ’—and he **_really_** needed to be somewhere with coffee _._ So he caved, and found a small little place a few blocks down where people wouldn’t recognize him as the local computer science tutor.)

Hours passed, and hundreds of lines of code and several test runs later, Tao was finally making progress.

“It’s cat-man!”

He _knew_ that voice, and for as much as he shouldn’t indulge in the distraction, he just couldn’t help it.

“Teira, was it?” Tao beamed at the approaching girl, her bouncing figure cutting past customers and towards him in her bright blue peacoat and white scarf—her guardian following close behind, greeting Tao with a polite wave of his hand. Tao waved back.

“Mhm, that’s me. Hey, big bro--”

‘ _Big **bro**_?’

Tao’s mind filtered out the rest of what she said at the realization that the man wasn’t her father. Brother. Just a brother. Right? Did he hear that right?

‘ _Oh_ ’.

This changed _a lot_ of things. Maybe…

“He’s working, Teira. We shouldn’t bother him.” Tao waved away the stranger’s concern as quickly as he’d stated it.

“No, no. It’s fine, I promise! I need a break anyway,” Flipping around in his chair, the student bent down closer to Teira’s level and began talking to her, his hands clasped in front of him.

“So what have you been up to? You and your big bro getting drinks again?”

“Yep! Takeo doesn’t have work on Saturdays, so we go out and do stuff.” She beamed at him with her answer, almost as if she were proud of it.

“Stuff, huh? What kinda stuff?”

Teira began sliding up the chair adjacent to him, struggling along with little huffs until she finally plopped herself on the cushion and faced him with the most business-like expression he’d seen on anyone in _weeks_. It was so adorable Tao almost laughed, but he called on all his will power to hold it in. He couldn’t imagine how scorned she'd feel if he so much as chuckled at her with how serious she was being.

“Well, this morning we had pancakes and bacon, and my pancake was in the shape of a puppy, and _then_ we went to the lake and I got to feed the ducks.”

“Were they mean ducks? Or nice ducks?” Serious. He had to stay serious. He could not laugh at that determined expression on her face.

“Mean! They were _so_ mean! One almost bit me and bro had to chase it off.” Her hands were gesturing wildly at this point, animating her tale with sounds and gestures while Tao nodded her on.

“Well, that wasn’t very polite of them, huh? You gave them food and everything.”

“I know! I even did as bro said and didn’t touch ‘em.”

“Ducks aren’t cool anyway. Who needs ‘em?” Teira snickered at that.

“Yeah, who need ‘em?”

“The ecosystem does.” Both of them turned their heads to find Teira’s brother setting down three coffee cups, sliding one towards the child and the other towards the university student. Tao hadn’t even realized he had sneaked off to buy drinks, let alone leave them to themselves for a few minutes.

“You got me one?” Tao asked, eyeing the cup and then the stranger with a curious look.

“Yeah. You wouldn’t let me buy you a coffee the other day, so I got you one now.”

“Ohoo, sneaky. Fine, I’ll accept it then, Mister Takeo.”

“... She told you my name?” It was meant to be a question, really, but it came out more like a statement.

“Ha, yeah, she did. Oh, uh, mine’s Tao. Just to be fair.”

“Nice to meet you then, Tao.” Takeo turned to his coffee, taking a long sip like he damn well needed it. He seemed alert enough, but the closer Tao looked, the more he noticed the concealed circles under his eyes.

Tao knew that struggle all too well, but he knew better than to ask.

“Hot, hot, hot, hootttt—” Teira ripped their attention away from each other as she began chanting and waving at her tongue. On instinct, Takeo quickly snatched the tilting cup of cocoa from her hands.

“You have to let it cool a bit, Teira.”

“Hooooooot.” As usual, she ignored him and reached for her drink again as soon as her mouth had cooled off. Takeo sighed and kept it far above her reach.

“You’re going to burn your taste buds off if you keep it up.”

“Booo, am not!”

* * *

By the time a month passed, those two had become a very welcome ritual in the student’s life. Tao would be greeted by Teira, Takeo would buy them all drinks and sit by as he watched them with a fond look on his face, and Tao entertained Teira for half an hour or so until they had to leave, earning a brief discussion or two from Takeo along the way. They were still a bit of a mystery but he was okay with that. That always left a little for him to unravel each Saturday—a new thing to look forward to in his somewhat reclusive life.

So far, he’d learned that Takeo had been raising Teira on his own for a while (‘ _That explains the tired eyes…_ ’ he thought), and that Teira was actually six, not five like he assumed. Takeo was also a security person of some kind—that’d he deduced by the little snippets he dropped here and there about his job, but aside from that, their background was still vague.

Takeo and Teira, on the other hand, knew a lot more about Tao than Tao knew about them. He’d been all too eager to tell his story when Teira finally asked in a not-so-tactful way. He was a Hong Kong native, going to school abroad in Korea for computer science and starting an internship next year with a Korean software firm. He spoke four languages, going on five, and he’d hacked a police station’s database for fun once when he was fifteen, uncaught.

(Takeo tried to look appalled by that tale, but instead looked more impressed than anything. Afterwords, Teira asked him if he’d teach her how to “hack”. She had no idea what hacking was but it seemed _cool_ , thank you.)

Tonight was a little different than usual, though. Teira looked ready to fall asleep into her half-eaten pastry, and with a little nudging from her brother, began dozing against his arm, using his scarf as a pillow.

“She had a long day, huh?” Tao kept his voice low, not wanting to startle her awake.

“She spent all day at the park and the movies. I’m surprised she didn’t fall over sooner.”

They fell silent for a moment, Takeo looking more than happy to enjoy the ambiance of the café and to have a moment of peace in his day. Tao could only oblige, waiting patiently before saying the thought that had been bubbling on his mind for _days_ now.

“I’ll be taking finals soon.” Tao waited for Takeo to break his gaze from the window before continuing on. “Then I go back to Hong Kong for a few weeks after that, for the holidays.”

“That’s good, isn’t it? You’ll get to see your family for a while.”

“Yeah it is, I suppose.” Takeo’s brow furrowed at that response, visibly reacting to the hesitance in the student’s voice. He didn’t ask any questions though, to Tao’s relief.

(Still waters ran deep, especially when it came to his parents, and he didn’t like to divulge those details if he didn’t have to.)

“We’ll miss you, though. Teira will probably ask about you every day until you get back.”

“Well… if that's really the case...” A smirk then swiftly spread across Tao’s face, leaving Takeo looking worried and confused as the hacker reached around in his backpack. After a few seconds, he finally found what he was digging for: a black pen.

“Should I be concerned?” Takeo asked, eyeing the napkin Tao snatched from his side of the table and began scribbling on.

“I don't know. Is my phone number a concern?” He offered Takeo the napkin, his cell phone number scrawled across it. “At least this way, Teira doesn’t have to wonder what I’m up to for the next few weeks. And you can talk to me too, of course.” Tao grinned wide as his friend broke out into a small smile of his own, taking the napkin from Tao’s grasp and tucking it in his coat pocket.

“I feel like this is just an excuse to give me your number.”

“Aw, don’t be like that. You know I mean it.”

Takeo rolled his eyes.

“ _I_ know you have a secondary motive. But don’t worry, we’ll call you sometime.”

Tao was looking forward to it, and judging by the look on Takeo’s face, he was too.

**Author's Note:**

> The little desktop cats are based on Shimejis. I used to have so many running at once it was a wonder I could navigate my desktop… 
> 
> A lot of Teira’s actions and interactions with the guys are based on some of my own interactions with my brother, who is much younger than I am. I guess inspiration comes from everywhere, huh.
> 
> Anyway, this is my first fic in a long while, so I hope it turned out alright. I’ll probably make this a small series of chronological snippets from here on, rather than a fic with a linear plot. I have a few snippets planned already actually and I might plan some more if people like this silly AU.


End file.
